In this paper, our aim is to reframe the debates around Relational Aesthetics, as initiated by curator Nicolas Bourriaud in 1998. We will mobilize a new materialist perspective, particularly regarding ecological and (post-)colonial entanglements of worldly relations, experiences, and bodies as they appear in the works of Feélix Guattari, Donna Haraway and Edouard Glissant. Through their writings, we will argue for a Worldly Relational Aesthetics that is speculatively productive as well as critically situated – and that is thereby of special importance for our present age. We deem it necessary, for contemporary aesthetics to have any political purchase, to expand its scope on both ends, artistic practice and art institutions and a conception of sensuous experience that remains “all too human” (Nietzsche) in most strands of aesthetic theory.

Our thesis is that certain artistic research practices activate an «aesthetics of the earth» opening up an experiential layer of translocal relationality through the sensuous as worldly sets of relations. Discussing artistic examples pertaining to the relational and the earth, affords us (as recipients and theorists) to think less about them but rather in resonance with them. Our approach thus foregrounds an aesthetics of the earth that is both relation-specific and cautious of continued processes of colonization as key aspect of Western theoretical legacies such as “philosophies of aesthetics.”